For piezoelectric sensors, the usage of flexible substrates can achieve better performance with higher strain comparing to using rigid substrates. However, most of flexible substrates are plastic based materials which cannot be sustained under high temperature greater than 300°C during the sintering or annealing process which will up to more than 800°C in the fabrication process. Moreover, the cracks are easily formed during transferring when the thickness of PZT film is larger than 10 μm. Although, there are transferring technique in flexible electronics process such as epitaxial lift-off (ELO) and water-assisted transfer printing (WTP) developed by other groups, but the target film should be soaked into the etchant or other solvent to achieve transferring which may affect the performance of PZT film. Nowadays, there still have no suitable method to transferring the PZT thick film with standardized process. In this research, we modify and improve the transferring technique by adding sacrificial metal layer without solvent-assisted that the thick PZT film deposited by screen-printing method can be transferred to flexible substrates successfully. Also, the PZT film by screen-printing method can achieve greater than 10 μm thickness without cracks before and after transferred. Finally, the transferring technique used for batched thick PZT film deposited by screen-printing method is proved by simple piezoelectric cantilever output performance characterization.
Wind energy has been seen as a most potential renewable energy. However, in shore environments, the wind turbine usually suffers constant impact of sand and strong wind speed, which causes the surface to deteriorate: cracks may appear. To reduce the wind turbine operations and maintenance (O and M) cost, assembling a self-powered surface condition monitoring system (SCMS) becomes the most important measures. In this paper, a meso-scale piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) was fabricated, based on a tapered cantilever beam to scavenge the rotational energy to power SCMS. The advantages are to increase its output power density and its lifetime comparing to the traditional rectangular cantilever beam. A frequency up-conversion method was adopted to accommodate PEH to working under variety of rotational speed by using two opposing magnets. With different distances between two magnets, the output voltage and the daily output energy of the PEH were investigated under 5 rpm – 30 rpm rotational speed. The maximum output voltage is 2.7 V, 9.1 V and 13.6 V when the magnets spacing is 3 mm, 2 mm and 1 mm, respectively. For the magnet spacing of 1 mm, the daily output energy of the PEH was estimated to be 5.26 J under periodic magnetic plucking at 30 rpm, much higher than the 0.2 J of SCMS’s daily energy consumption, making this harvester an excellent solution for the abovementioned needs.
MEMS accelerometers are widely employed in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Among them, capacitive types are commonly used due to their low cost and compatibility with the commercial CMOS fabrication lines. However, piezoelectric MEMS accelerometers have great research popularity attributed to their wide working range, self-generating property and removal of the need for vacuum sealing. This study designs, fabricates and analyzes a piezoelectriccantilever- beam-based accelerometer in meso scale, which is constructed by a tungsten proof mass and a composite beam comprising of PZT and stainless steel layers. Four structures with different geometries/dimensions are designed for comparison, including rectangular and trapezoid beam shapes. All the devices are fabricated by MEMS processes where aerosol deposition is utilized to make high-quality PZT sensing layer. And the implementation of stainless steel substrate makes the fabrication flow simple and cost-effective. Experiments show that the natural frequencies of the four structures range from 572.25 Hz to 769.01 Hz, corresponding to respective working frequency range from 110 Hz to 150 Hz. The low frequency limit of 10 Hz is determined by a tailor-designed charge amplifier, which is used to amplify the output charge signal of the developed sensor. At the working frequency of 95 Hz, charge sensitivities of 23.9 pC/g to 41.4 pC/g are measured for the four structures. Comparison with other studies, the designed devices have high sensitivities.
The cantilever beam type of PEH (piezoelectric energy harvester) has been widely studied for years due to simple design and effectively generate high strain and high ouput power. In our previously researches, the PEH unit with area of 6 mm by 9 mm has output performance around 300 μW under base excitation of 0.5g acceleration level. Moreover, we have designed the tapered shape cantilever beam of PEH for optimizing the beam strain distribution and verified that the output performance and durability are not inferior to rectangular one we have fabricated before. In this study, the tapered shape cantilever beam PEHs are chosen for durability experiment to investigate the relevance among output performance, fatigability and mechanical properties of devices with a long-term working period under different working temperature. The result evidently shows the durability difference when the device is operated under high temperature (50°C) with significant natural frequency drop and the PEH could not maintain constant power output.
MEMS piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) has been widely designed in cantilever beam style because of ease of fabrication and effective to generate large strain and output power. There are already several studies on tapered beam shapes to improve the overall performance of energy harvested. In this paper, we investigate cantilever beam type PEH in rectangular, trapezoidal and triangle shapes, and the devices are limited to the area smaller than 1cm × 1 cm for better flexibility in applications. The power output and the life time of each shape of devices are fabricated and characterized. The output power are tested with optimal resistance loads, and the output power are 145.3 μW, 125.3 μW and 107.8 μW for triangle, trapezoidal and rectangular shapes of devices respectively under excitation of 0.5g acceleration vibration level in the resonant frequency of the transducer. The tip displacements of the 3 devices are 3.05 mm, 2.66 mm, and 2.44 mm for triangular, trapezoidal and rectangular shape devices, respectively. To study the lifetime and durability issue, triangular and rectangular devices are excited under 0.2g to 1g for 24 hours. The resonant frequency shifting, tip displacement and open circuit voltage changing are monitored will be detailed in the paper.
Here we present a new rapid prototyped PZT MEMS actuator for potential 2D scanning endoscopic application. The proposed 6.1 mm x 7.1 mm x 5 μm thick film PZT push-pull actuator made by directly deposited on a thin 100 μm thick stainless steel substrate by using an aerosol deposition (AD) method. The actuator features a stable linear 2D vibration using 1-D actuation. Initial fabrication results, electrical impedance, mechanical will be presented and discussed.
Cantilever type piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) is widely adopted in the design of vibration energy harvesters because of simple, effective and easy to fabricate. When the PEH is working under excitation of continuous vibration sources, like mounting on motors, reliability and durability is a major concern. The failure mode and fatigue issues will be important design considerations in field applications. Since the largest strain of a cantilever structure is located in the clamping position of fixed end, the location is therefore the weakest point of the structure and the hot zone of mechanical cracks. The failure mode due to fatigue under long time excitation of vibration sources is typically continuously developing small cracks on the piezoelectric PZT films till tearing the surface electrodes and caused open circuit to the output circuitry. Therefore, extending the lifetime with minimize the surface electrodes cracking becomes a key point for field applications.
Previously, we focused on the output performance of PEH. At PowerMEMS 2014 [1], we presented a high performance PEH based on PZT thin films fabricated with a homemade PZT deposition equipment on stainless steel substrates. We confirmed that the stainless steel based PEH can generate better output power than silicon based devices under the same vibration excitation levels, and also the stainless based PEH can have longer lifetime when excited at higher vibration levels due to better mechanical strength. In this study, we tried to further reinforce the PEH with a conductive adhesive tape sticking on the surface electrode near the clamping position. We investigated the change of failure mode and mechanical behaviors, including the frequency bandwidth and non-linearity of the piezoelectric energy harvester.
The PEH devices was mounted on a shaker for long time testing with vibration frequency set around 120Hz at 0.5g, 0.6g, and 0.7g acceleration vibration levels. The electrodes of the PEH device were cracked after 13 million cycles under 0.5g and 1 million cycles under 0.6g. The PEH has significant output power decreasing after the electrode is cracked and before being fully open circuit. The cracks of stainless steel substrate was also found after 1 million cycles under 0.7g vibration. For the device reinforced with conductive adhesive tape, we can see a steady output without degradation extended to more than 1.5 million cycles under 0.7g vibration. The other interesting finding in this study is with the added damping after adhering the conductive tape, the frequency bandwidth increased from 1.5Hz to 4Hz under 0.5g vibration level while the resonance frequency increased from 105Hz to 128Hz. Moreover, the reinforced devices have much better stability and linearity performance compared with the original devices. All the experimental details and discussion of the flexible conductive adhesive tape reinforced PEH will all be detailed in this paper.
A new lead-zirconium-titanate (PZT) actuator design for a micro scanning illuminating device is being developed. The thin PZT film is deposited directly on stainless steel by using an aerosol deposition machine. The aerosol deposition method enables inexpensive, quick, room temperature fabrication while producing high quality PZT films. The presented scanners would be attractive for endoscopic device applications, where inexpensive systems with high resolution would be a move toward disposal endoscopes. The design of this scanning illuminator and fabrication method are presented. Measurements of the PZT layer surface roughness and the aerosol deposited PZT powder particle diameter are presented. Ongoing work and fabrication challenges are discussed.
To harvest energy from human motion and generate power for the emerging wearable devices, energy harvesters are required to work at very low frequency. There are several studies based on energy harvesting through human gait, which can generate significant power. However, when wearing these kind of devices, additional effort may be required and the user may feel uncomfortable when moving. The energy harvester developed here is composed of a 10 μm PZT thin-film deposited on 50 μm thick stainless steel foil by the aerosol deposition method. The PZT layer and the stainless steel foil are both very thin, thus the patch is highly flexible. The patch can be attached on the skin to harvester power through human motions such as the expansion of the chest region while breathing. The energy harvester will first be tested with a moving stage for power output measurements. The energy density can be determined for different deformation ranges and frequencies. The fabrication processes and testing results will all be detailed in this paper.
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